Guitar Lessons: A Guide to Your Options
So you want to play the guitar? Guitar lessons, in one form or another, are a must for anyone who wants to learn to play the guitar. Established musicians also rely on guitar lessons to pick up new skills and take them to the next level. Finding the right lesson, course, or product sounds simple, but there are so many options available that it’s a difficult task to figure out what’s best for your individual needs. These guidelines will help you sort through your options and make a good decision.
Guitar Lessons – Private or Online Instructor?
The traditional way to learn to play the guitar is by taking private lessons with a guitar teacher. The student typically meets with the instructor once a week for 30 minutes at a cost of around $15-25 per week. This is without a doubt a great option, and perhaps the best way to learn to play: under the personal guidance of a dedicated teacher. However, in many cases, private lessons are not a good option due to the time, cost, and transportation factors involved.
The good news for guitarists is that there are a wide range of alternatives to private instruction. The guitar lesson and instructional books have been a mainstay for years. Later, technological developments brought us lessons in the form of videotapes and DVDs, as well as multimedia software programs to run on the PC.
Today, widespread access to the Internet has caused a major revolution in the methods and availability of guitar instruction. Now a great deal (some might say a great deal!) of information on various guitar lesson options is available in minutes through your favorite search engine. The variety of options is staggering, from free online guitar lessons to high-level distance learning guitar instruction leading to a Berklee College of Music certificate,
In addition to better visibility into options, there have also been tremendous advances in the technology used to develop and deliver instructional material. Interactive video lessons in which the student controls the pace of learning and the tempo of the material are a good example of this. Online guitar lessons and products are immediately accessible on the Web, either on demand or downloaded to the local PC. This gives great flexibility on when and where to learn.
Guitar Lesson Options
In addition to private lessons, there are three basic formats of guitar lessons and teaching material.
Books- If you’re on a budget and like the idea of book portability, this may be the way to go for you. The books often come with a CD to provide audio tracks. Typical cost: $15-25
Video-Based Lessons In my experience, purely video-based lessons are a nice “icing on the cake” to help you learn, but they’re not usually a good basic guitar lesson program. They often lack the necessary supporting learning materials to be effective for reference learning.
Online multimedia lessons– The Web, along with advances in technology for creating learning material like videos, has really opened the door to some great multimedia guitar lesson programs. They can be delivered and accessed in a variety of ways: downloaded for use on your PC; it is accessed directly from your PC with a live web connection, or as a physical CD/DVD that runs on your PC.
Selection from the many options can be made easier with dedicated information on this topic on various guitar websites, such as this online guitar lesson guide.
Wrap
For those who want to learn to play the guitar, or play better, there is no better time than now to take advantage of the available online guitar lessons and learning options. The field of guitar education is certainly one that has benefited from the Internet!
Look for the following article in this series:
“Tips for guitar lessons: 10 keys to choose the right guitar lesson”
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“Guitar Chord Diagrams: An Essential Tool for Learning to Play the Guitar”
Copyright 2005 Peter Bussey of http://www.guitar-players-toolbox.com
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